These challenges seem to just be getting harder and harder, from practicing for a week, to learning a falseta, to learning a whole composition with a bonus of writing your own composition; now, I will expand that concept of writing a composition to an even harder level. Maybe someone should scale back the challenge-factor just a tad for the next challenge
This challenge stems from a personal experience of mine. I was at school one day this summer for a school event, and I had my guitar with me as usual. As I was standing in the lunch line, an acquaintance of mine came up to me seeming rather flustered and commanded me to play an angry song for her. She was very angry for some reason, and needed to hear an angry song to vent out that emotion. Now, I am not an angry person, not in the least bit, and anybody could tell you that. Consequently, I was at a loss for song. I do not write angry songs, I do not learn angry songs, I could not even think of something metal to play since I was in the spotlight. For a while, I even began to doubt that it is even possible to play an angry song on guitar. Needless to say, she was disappointedly left to find some other means of experiencing angry music. Now, I am also not the type to let go of a perfect opportunity to make my life difficult and challenge myself. After all, my school is named Challenge, and that is for a reason. I made it my personal challenge for myself to go outside of my nature and write an angry song, a feat which is turning out to be much more difficult than I originally imagined. I said it would be done by the time school started, which did not happen, but I am still working on it. Anyway, this all gave me the idea to extend the challenge to the Falseta community at large.
Thus, the challenge is to go out of your comfort zone, out of your nature, in writing a song. If you are never jovial, write an upbeat, cheerful song. If you are never sad, write a melancholic song. Just think of some emotion that you find it difficult to empathize with it, and express that in song. You can even model the feel of the composition after a whole situation or something else rather than a more general emotion. For instance, if you have never been out of the ghetto, imagine living in an upscale, gated neighborhood and write a composition that expresses what you think that would feel like. That may seem like a strange example, but you get the point: imagine yourself, do a 180 of that, and put that into song. Think of a particular technique or piece of music theory that you have difficulty with and are not particularly fond of, and use that concept extensively in the composition. Et cetera.
The challenge is even harder for y'all since this is a flamenco forum. Therefore, most of y'all will probably try to write the composition in a flamenco style, which somewhat limits the possibilities of what y'all can do with the composition. Flamenco is hard enough by itself; going out of your emotional comfort zone in flamenco is almost craziness. Because of that, I will say that you do not have to write a flamenco composition for this challenge if you do not wish to, although flamenco would be preferable and would gain you even more prestige. I will tell you that the ideas that I have developed so far for my angry song are not flamenco-based since that was not a stipulation of the original request, although it probably would not take much difficulty to flamenco-ize my particular riffs.
I would say have fun with the challenge, but you may be selecting some emotion, such as sadness or anger, such that having fun would counteract the emotion that you are trying to feel. But have fun with it anyway
09-02-2010, 07:59 PM
Challenge 4 - Go Outside of Your Comfort Zone
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